


(why don't we go) somewhere only we know

by translorastyrell (nerddowell)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Awkwardness, Canon Era, Childhood Sweethearts, Crushes, Developing Relationship, Emotionally Repressed, F, Friendship/Love, Internalized Homophobia, Kissing, M/M, Miscommunication, Mutual Pining, Oh Shit I Caught The FeelingsTM!Renly, Pining, Pre-Canon, Requited Unrequited Love, Unresolved Emotional Tension, boys unaware they are in love continue to mope over each other like children, god it's so awful i love it, these two make me cry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-23 11:44:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17682815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerddowell/pseuds/translorastyrell
Summary: And if you have a minute, why don’t we goTalk about it somewhere only we know?This could be the end of everythingSo why don’t we go somewhere only we know?A 5 + 1 Renly/Loras fanfic because the Keane song gave me so many feels I had to get them outsomehow.





	(why don't we go) somewhere only we know

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ennta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ennta/gifts), [rensbarath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rensbarath/gifts), [afewreelthoughts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afewreelthoughts/gifts).



> To Sam, Beth and Reel, for always cheerleading me on with all my pretentious rubbish.

**I.**

The first time they go to the cave, Loras is less listening to Renly’s waxing rhapsodic about the harsh, jagged Stormlands coast than he is preoccupied with homesickness. He huddles down into the collar of his doublet, hugging himself tight against the cold. Not that it helps; the delicate green satin, perfect for the balmy warmth of the Reach, doesn’t stand a chance against the Stormlands’ biting winds and driving rain. Glancing down at the foot of the cliffs, the sea is steel grey, hammering angry white fists against the sheer rock, and the cries of the gulls are lost to the scream of the wind as they are buffeted about in the gale. Loras’ fingers are blue and mottled with cold, his cheeks lashed red and stinging with the spray, salt crystallising in his hair. He’s miserable.

Renly, ahead of him on the cliffs and stripped down to his shirtsleeves, is running barefoot and trailing the rich, buttery yellow velvet of his doublet behind him like a flag. He holds it out behind him like a sail, laughing as the wind fills it and billows it out, throwing him forwards and almost off the top of the cliff before he catches hold of the branch of a tree to anchor himself. The gust tears it out of his grasp a second later, hurling it out to sea, and he watches the fabric twist and dance on the current before dropping to the waves below. The fabric turns from yellow to gold to muddy brown as the water seeps in, sinking slowly below the surface, and Renly hangs onto his branch to watch.

‘You’ll never get it back now!’ Loras shouts over the wind, hating him a little for throwing it away when Loras is so cold, and Renly laughs and shrugs.

‘I’ve plenty more,’ he grins, ‘now come on, we’re almost there!’

He lets go of the branch and leads Loras down a path cut through the scrub and heather into narrow steps down the face of the cliff, slippery and worn from the constant buffeting from wave and wind. Several times Loras slips, almost falls; Renly, surefooted as a mountain goat, catches him, hands infuriatingly warm on his arms. Halfway down, Renly edges from the steps onto a tiny outcrop of rock, barely wide enough for the tips of his toes to balance, and holds onto the cliff face to shuffle sideways along the length of it. Loras stares at him like he’s mad.

‘You’ll fall!’

‘I won’t, I’ve done this a thousand times.’ Renly shakes his head, smiling, and continues to edge across. Loras glances back at the castle, a mile behind them along the top of the cliffs, the faded Baratheon pennant snapping and fluttering from the top of the tower, and thinks about going back. The thought of Penrose catching him when he gets back, however, gives him pause. He’s only been Renly’s squire for an hour, but the castellan seems already to have got it in for him, demanding that he come to his rooms and pack away his things properly as befits a lord of the Reach’s son instead of ‘strewing them about like some shit-shovelling pigherd from Flea Bottom!’. Loras had soon decided that Penrose must know his grandmother - they share a sharp tongue and an absolute refusal to mince their words - and so resigns himself to following Renly across the sliver of rock.

He looks back towards the steps, only to realise that Renly has disappeared. Panic sets in a moment later as he stares down at the furious waves, trying to muster the courage for a dive if necessary. He swallows his pounding heart, scrunches his eyes closed against the spray, and steps onto the outcrop, preparing himself.

‘Renly!’ he yells into the cliff, hoping his lord - if he’s not already dead, broken on the rocks below or drowned by the current - can hear him over the screaming storm. ‘RENLY!’

A cheerful voice answers, unseen. ‘Come on, Loras, I’ve been waiting hours!’

Fury courses through him again - the idiot is _hiding_ from him! - and he scuttles, crablike, along the rock, sheer anger propelling his thin limbs. The further along he gets, the more he can see of a thin crack in the cliff face, the edge of a white linen shirtsleeve, and a pair of bright blue eyes looking at him. Renly is huddled at the entrance of a cave, and as Loras approaches, he edges forwards, extending an arm to help him across.

‘Be careful, it gets slippery here-’

‘When I get in there,’ Loras snarls through gritted teeth, ‘I’m going to kill you. I’m going to throw your body off the top of this seven-hells-damned cliff and _laugh_ as you hit the bottom.’

Renly just gives him another sunny smile, amused, and grips his wrist, pulling him down and inside a moment later.  
‘Why? You made it, didn’t you?’

Loras just glares at him, teeth chattering, and shivers. Renly’s face transforms from that blinding smile into concern. He pulls the smaller boy into his arms, rubbing both palms hard over Loras’ arms and shoulders to warm him.

‘You’re freezing, you should have said-’

‘When? When should I have said, Renly?’ Loras spits. ‘When I was barely given a chance to get inside, let alone change, before you were dragging me off on this gods-forsaken death wish? Or maybe when I watched you throw your own doublet off the top of the cliff to let the sea have it? Or was I meant to say something when I was hanging onto the cliff, petrified you’d fallen to your death and left me to do the same? When should I have said, _my lord_?’

Renly’s face is white, his eyes wide, and he looks down at his hands, still on Loras’ shoulders. With an audible gulp, he lets go, his head bowed and his eyes downcast, seeming to shrink from the larger-than-life will-o’-the-wisp he’d been on the top of the cliffs to a boy even smaller and younger than Loras himself.

‘I just… I just wanted to share this with you,’ he said quietly, his voice trembling. ‘I’ve never had anyone to share anything with before.’

‘I don’t want you to share with me,’ Loras snaps back, even as his heart clenches at the look of abject misery on Renly’s face. ‘I’m your _squire_ , not your friend.’

He tells himself he doesn’t hear the tiny choked noise Renly makes in response, doesn’t see the clenching of white knuckles around the cuffs of his shirt or the tears sparkling along the other boy’s lower lashes.

* * *

**II.**

The second time they go to the cave, the Stormlands’ eponymous howling gales have abated, at least for the time being. The sea in the bay is smooth as glass, glittering darkly in the weak sunlight behind the clouds, and although a breeze grasps at Loras’ doublet - this time velvet, thick and warm against the wind, and the deep black of all of House Baratheon’s servants’ livery - the temperature is mild if a little chilly. This time, Loras looks around him, at the rough beauty of the cliffs, the heather greyish-purple in bloom, and the gulls circling over their heads.

Sentinel rocks line the coast, great slate-grey stacks of rock whittled thin by the tides, littered with the white heads of nesting sea birds and small tufted patches of what little greenery has managed to cling grimly on to their harsh surfaces. Each one wears a dingy grey-green skirt of foam, frothing where the waves lap with soft sibilant sounds around their feet; in the shallows, the shadows of fish can be seen darting amongst sea weed and pebbles, avoiding the cruel hungry mouths of the gulls. He sits at the opening, dangling his feet off the ledge of rock and pointing his toes towards the water, to watch them, gripping the edge with white knuckles. Renly comes to sit beside him, and he shuffles away, but only slightly. The other boy’s breath catches in his throat with hurt, and this time, Loras brushes his pinkie against the side of Renly’s, only for a split second, in apology.

‘It’s a long way down,’ Renly finally says, after what feels like hours of silence. When Loras turns to look at him, he’s staring up at the sky, his eyes murky and clouded like the water below. There’s a freckle at the very corner of his left eye, touched by the tip of an eyelash, and Loras finds himself noticing it for the first time, unable to look away until Renly’s head turns and almost catches him looking. He nods to show he heard.

‘Yes.’

‘I used to be afraid of falling,’ Renly says slowly, shifting his position to tuck his feet underneath him. The creased, callused pink soles with their slick brownish coating of mud and sea slime leave marks on the backs of his breeches, the perfect imprint of his feet. Loras notices that, too, but again doesn’t say a word. He thinks about his sister back home, the time she borrowed a pair of his breeches to go exploring the rock pools, and how she fell in, cutting her foot on a sharp rock when she slipped. How her foot, delicate and pink and covered in sand and mud like Renly’s is now, left a smear of blood on his breeches that no amount of washing would get out. He still has those breeches, tucked away amongst a trunk of things he has brought from the Reach, and the thought is strangely comforting and unsettling at once for reasons he can’t name.

‘I used to be afraid of the water.’ Renly looks down again, at the bay calm beneath them, and toys with the hem of his doublet. ‘It looks so calm today, almost inviting, as though to dive in would be like climbing into your own bath. But there are rocks beneath the surface that you can’t see even on the clearest day. When I was a baby, not even past my first name day, my parents drowned here in the bay. Stannis and Robert watched them from the top of the tower. The storm whipped up out of nowhere, they said, like the storms always do, and the ship was smashed to pieces against the stacks, and my parents probably ground to dust between the rocks. The only survivor of the wreck was the fool they’d brought home, the one Stannis now keeps on Dragonstone.’

Loras looks at Renly, his cheeks pink with the fresh air and his hair loose and tangled around his ears, so alive, and then down at the sea. He tries to imagine how it would feel not only to watch his parents die before his very eyes, but to never have known them at all, except for the story of how it came to be so. He wonders whether Renly has anything of his parents, whether Steffon Baratheon had the same wild inky-black hair with the untameable cowlick at the crown; whether Cassana Estermont had Renly’s eyes like the sea, changeable from deepest blue to emerald green to grey as storm clouds. He wonders whether Steffon had Renly’s easy smiles, Cassana his freckle at the corner of her eye too. He wonders for a long time, until Renly again breaks the silence.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says quietly, and Loras is shaken from his reverie.

‘What for?’

‘I’m doing it again,’ Renly murmurs, pulling a straggling wildflower from a crack in the rock, picking apart its petals in nervous fingers. ‘Talking to you as if we’re friends, instead of a lord and his squire.’

Loras feels his stomach tie itself in a knot. He doesn’t know what to say to that - _it doesn’t matter_ or _it’s alright_ or maybe even _I’m sorry, too_ \- so he keeps quiet. Instead he pulls himself to his feet, dusting off the sand and grime from his breeches, and pulls his doublet off over his head. Renly watches him in confusion, black brow creased, as Loras neatly folds the black velvet and places it inside the cave where it won’t get wet if rain comes, and does the same with his shirt. His breeches come off next, until he’s standing on the rock ledge in just his smallclothes, brown chest bared to the watery sunlight and goosebumps starting to rise on his arms. He leans over slightly to peer down at the water, and Renly suddenly bolts to his feet.

‘Loras, no-’

He takes a few steps back, into the mouth of the cave, and relief washes over Renly’s face for a couple of seconds until Loras races past him in a streak of Reach-summer-tanned skin and flails, screaming, over the edge to plummet into the water. Renly, frozen in horror, can only stare in shock at the spot in the air where his squire had fallen before he chases after him, skidding to a halt at the lip of the outcrop, and stares down at the rings of ripples spreading menacingly out from where Loras had gone under. He drops to his knees, clinging to the edge, and bawls, ‘LORAS!’, his voice strident with fear.

Loras’ head breaks the surface again a second later, gasping for air, in a tangle of wet brown curls as he treads water, staring back up at his lord, white-faced and half blind with panic on the edge of the cliff.

‘There!’ he shouts back. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of!’

* * *

**III.**

The third time is different again. This time, it’s at Loras’ request. Renly has been distant lately, often leaving the castle late at night only to return in the small hours of the morning, always with the same troubled expression in his eyes, and Loras is confused, even a little frightened by it. Renly is an excellent actor, a born mummer as Penrose so often says, but even the masks his lord puts on every morning, the cheerful smile and the jovial tone of voice, can’t hide the underlying tension in his limbs, the way he almost flinches away from Loras’ touch whilst he helps him dress. Loras doesn’t understand it; it’s nothing more or less than he’s ever done for Renly before, but it’s as though Renly suddenly can’t bear to have Loras in his presence, nor even breathing the same air as him.

Renly is acting again, his voice thoughtful as he gazes up at the sky - overcast with rolling pitch-black clouds and flashing with forks of lightning, until the walls of the cave boom and echo with the clap and roar of thunder and the wind whistles as it forces its way through the entrance. It’s a skilled performance, but a performance nonetheless; Loras can see the stiffness in his spine beneath the linen of his shirt (no doublet again, after the sleeve was caught on a gorse bush and torn, leaving a scrap of crimson Myrish silk behind), the bunching of the muscles in Renly’s shoulders, hear the almost imperceptible tremor belying his words.

‘Do you think,’ Renly asks, as another cymbal-crash of thunder echoes through the cave and sets Loras’ ears to ringing like the bells of a sept, ‘that thunder is caused by the giants who made the world fighting? Or is it perhaps the roar of some great beast deep below the earth in his sleep, perhaps a dragon threatening to be woken?’

‘I don’t know, my lord,’ Loras answers, watching Renly’s face as blue light flashes across his features, lightning striking one of the sentinel rock stacks in the bay with a crackle and a hiss, the scent of burning air filling the cave. ‘Perhaps we should ask your maester.’

‘Oh, he would tell us it was something to do with the air, or the movement of the earth, or some such scientific bore,’ Renly scoffs, waving him away. ‘Imagining all of the other things it could be, the things not explained by his instruments or his books, is far more fun, don’t you think?’

‘Yes, my lord,’ Loras says, ‘if you say so, my lord.’

‘Why are you doing that?’ Renly asks, frowning. He turns to look at Loras, his eyes pitch black where he’s turned away from the light, the freckle on his cheek hidden by the shadows inside the cave and his hair salt-sprayed and wild around his face. His face has changed since Loras first arrived three years ago. Elongated somehow, sharpened around the jaw and cheekbones, stubble starting to show blue against his jaw and throat. A little of its boyish roundness shows in the soft apple of his cheeks, but he looks a man grown now, a lord in his own right, rather than the boy playing at lord of the castle Loras had thought him at first. A sudden spate of butterflies swarm in Loras’ stomach, and he wonders when he grew so afraid of the thunder he has heard almost every night since arriving at Storm’s End.

‘Doing what, my lord?’

‘That! _My lord_ ing me, like you’ve not been calling me Renly for more time than is really proper. At least in Penrose’s opinion,’ he tacks on at the end, still frowning.

Loras picks at a stray thread on his doublet, unravelling one golden prong of the antlers embroidered there, the sigil of Renly’s house. ‘Why are you avoiding me?’ he asks by way of answer, and Renly stares at him, wrongfooted.

‘Avoiding you? I’m not avoiding you.’

‘You are,’ Loras tells him, trying not to let the hurt he feels bleed through into his tone. ‘You wince whenever I speak to you in the mornings, and flinch away from me when I hand you your shirt or hold up your towel after your bath. You spend the nights away from the castle when you used to come to my chambers and play cyvasse or tell me stories, and you don’t come back until the morning. You ride away every night under your biggest, heaviest cloak, and you don’t ever tell me where you’re going, and worse, in the mornings, you pretend like you haven’t even gone. You shut me out. So I call you _my lord_ because I’m back to being only your squire, when I had thought I was your friend.’ By the end of his speech his voice is trembling as badly as his body, fists clenched by his sides, and his heart throbs against his ribs, a dull tattoo of pain as he fights to control the tears threatening to spill from his eyes. Renly looks thunderstruck.

‘I didn’t - I-’

‘Thought I didn’t notice?’ Loras asks bitterly.

Renly ducks his head, ashamed. ‘Yes.’

‘You’re - you _were_ ,’ he corrects himself, ‘- my friend. Of course I noticed.’

‘Don’t say that,’ Renly whispers, voice agonised. ‘Don’t - don’t say it like it’s no longer the case. You are my friend, Loras, I just - I just thought that maybe - you no longer wanted to be mine.’

‘Why in seven hells not?’ Loras blazes, furious. He doesn’t understand what’s going on, why Renly would possibly think that Loras didn’t want to be his friend any more. Any fool with eyes could tell that Renly was Loras’ closest friend in all the world, that the pair of them were closer than brothers. They spent every waking moment in one another’s pockets, after all.

‘It’s complicated,’ Renly says quietly, his voice hesitant. ‘I’m… I’m not a good person for you to be friends with.’

‘That sounds a lot like you making my decisions for me,’ Loras says angrily, ‘and you know what you can do with that? You can shove it up your-’

‘I’m twisted,’ Renly blurts out, wringing his hands. ‘I’m - I’m wrong, Loras, in the basest way it’s possible to be wrong. You don’t understand, you’re young and - and good and normal-’

‘Garlan would disagree,’ Loras says, still confused as to what Renly means but trying to make him smile at least. Renly’s lips curl up half-heartedly into the weakest pretense of a smile Loras has ever seen, and his heart sinks like lead to the soles of his boots.

‘I - I’m not… normal. Do you understand? I don’t - Look. Most men give their attentions to women the way I… I give mine to men. Most men take a pretty girl to bed and are perfectly content, enjoy it, even. I can’t. I can’t enjoy women like that, I’ve tried, I’ve forced myself to spend fortunes on tumbling the best, the most beautiful whores the Stormlands have to offer and I still can’t do it. But I - I kissed a boy once, another knight’s squire and… and I got more satisfaction out of even that fumbling kiss than a thousand nights spent trying to stick my cock in a woman. Do you understand, Loras?’

Loras isn’t sure he does, even now, but he nods. ‘Yes.’

‘No you don’t,’ Renly says, raw and tortured, and turns away. ‘I’m twisted. Wrong. And you shouldn’t be friends with me, shouldn’t even be around me, in case I somehow twist you, too. It’s disgusting.’

‘No it’s not,’ Loras says fiercely, and it rings with the clarity of truth in the charged air of the cave. ‘It’s you, and nothing you are is disgusting, Renly. You are my friend. And even if you kiss a thousand boys, a million boys, I will never think you’re disgusting for it.’ He grasps Renly’s hands tightly in his own, forcing him to look at him, and sets his jaw stubbornly.

The tiny curving of Renly’s lips into the ghost of a smile is, this time, genuine.

* * *

**IV.**

Their fourth visit to the cave is a goodbye of sorts. Renly leaves for his lord’s progress in the morning, leaving Loras behind to continue his knight’s training under the master-at-arms. He doesn’t want to go at all, and Loras wants him to go even less. So in the middle of the night they steal down to the cave in the cliff, barefoot and silent over the flagstones of the castle courtyard until they’re under the bailey gate and out onto the moors, and from there running like children. The night is clear, the sky a deep purple like an old bruise and dotted with stars like a handful of diamonds strewn over velvet; Renly looks like he wants to stop and admire them until Loras grabs him by the hand and pulls him along.

Long after Renly has caught up, their hands are still linked, palms pressed together and fingers tangled, and Loras’ pulse is rabbit-fast and thundering in his ears, butterflies in his stomach, his mouth dry. He licks his lips nervously, feeling how chapped they are in the cool of the night air, and worries at the broken skin with his teeth. Renly still hasn’t let go of his hand, and the butterflies in his stomach are dragons, filling his roiling belly until he feels like he could vomit from nerves or excitement or both. It’s not the first time they’ve taken flight from the castle during the night, nor will it be the last, he thinks; but there’s something brewing in the still air, a tension winding tighter and tighter between himself and Renly like a spring ready to snap.

He crawls to the back of the cave, having to duck his head and fold his coltish limbs into a knot to be able to fit. When he was a boy of ten, the cave had seemed cavernous, as big as the sept at Highgarden with its flying vaulted ceiling filled with light. At fifteen, it is almost painfully small, and Renly is equally compressed as he crawls in after him.

They gaze at one another, faces silvered by the moonlight, and Renly’s hair seems wreathed in stars where the light catches the dewdrops amongst the black strands. His eyes are black in the dark, but Loras knows now how blue they are, as blue as the sky on a clear summer day in the Reach except for when they’re as green as new grass or the apples that grow on the Fossoways’ orchard trees. As well as the freckle at the corner of his eye, there’s twenty-eight more, all scattered across the bridge of his nose and the tops of his cheekbones; Loras has counted them a thousand times, and then a thousand more, with his eyes during the day and sometimes, when Renly has fallen asleep on the window seat in his chambers, with his fingers at night, tracing them until he’s sure he can remember the feel of his lord’s soft skin and the constellations they make in his sleep. Renly’s lips part on a sigh of warm air against Loras’ cheek, and his heart beats all the harder against his ribcage, the butterfly-dragons in his stomach swarming.

‘Must you go?’ he asks finally, in a tone altogether too plaintive, and Renly smiles. His front tooth is crooked, just slightly, a tiny gap between it and its neighbour, and Loras wants to trace that gap with his tongue, wants to kiss Renly until he has his taste imprinted on the inside of his mouth like the sweetest summerwine from the Arbour. He wants, he wants, he _wants_. But he doesn’t dare.

‘I’m afraid I must,’ Renly murmurs, and his hand comes up to brush a curl behind Loras’ ear. His thumb lingers on Loras’ cheekbone, soft and gentle despite the callus from all of the rock climbing and archery and other exploits they get up to, and Loras almost can’t bear it. He shuts his eyes, trying to get a grip on himself, on the sheer need turning his thoughts to static and his brain to mush. He takes a deep breath in, holding it in his lungs until they scream in protest, then lets it out, letting it whistle through his nose. Renly huffs a soft laugh, and Loras would swear that he can almost feel the other boy’s lips against his own, the barest trace of soft damp skin against soft damp skin. He breathes out again, shaky, and Renly answers with a breath of his own.

‘Can you hear that?’ he murmurs, and Loras trembles.

‘Hear what?’ he asks weakly. Renly’s hand takes his, presses it to his chest, warm beneath the linen of his shirt. Loras rubs his thumb over the material, wishing it gone, wanting to lay skin against skin, touch every single inch of Renly’s body before he’s gone for months on end. Maybe on his progress he will meet another boy, more comely and more charming, as comely and charming as Renly himself, and he will kiss that boy instead of Loras, and tumble that boy instead of Loras, and by the time he returns to his squire at Storm’s End Loras will have melted away to nothing in his heart and all the light in the world will have been snuffed out like a candle.

Renly’s voice is soft, pained, when he speaks.

‘Why are you crying?’

Loras sniffs and opens his eyes, another tear rolling slowly down his cheek. ‘Don’t forget about me,’ he pleads, his voice raw, and Renly makes a wounded noise deep in his throat. He leans forward slowly, closing the distance until Loras can see nothing but the blue-black of his eyes and feel nothing but the pounding of his heart under his hand and the whisper of Renly’s breath against his mouth and then -

And _then_.

Renly’s lips brush his, so gentle Loras feels the ache for more in his _soul_ , and he must make some noise to get that across because Renly is moving, tilting his head to touch his mouth to Loras’ again, and then again, and again and again until they’re locked together like two puzzle pieces, Loras’ tongue finally tracing that slender gap in Renly’s front teeth and the moan that reverberates through Renly like a plucked harp string reverberates through Loras, too, and he can’t breathe and he can’t think and he can’t do anything but kiss him back.

It’s perfect, so perfect it kills him to break away, but when he’s dizzy with the lack of air and Renly’s hands loosen from where they had been tangled, vice-tight, in his hair, break away he does. And Renly is staring at him as though Loras has the moon and the stars and the whole world in his eyes, and his heart is so full Loras thinks he’ll burst with trying to contain it inside his body. He breathes out, and Renly breathes out with him.

‘You stupid boy,’ he whispers. ‘Loras, you stupid, beautiful boy, how could I ever forget about you?’

And Loras smiles, and kisses him again, and again, until the sun rises and warms their skin as they sit, hands interlinked, on the edge of the cliff.

* * *

**V.**

The fifth time they visit the cave, Loras is no longer a squire but a knight, with the seven oils of the Faith still running down his neck and lying, sweet and fragrant, in his hair. Renly is dressed like a king, resplendent in rich yellows and golds, and crowned with the golden light of the dawn. Loras’ fingers tremble as he divests his lord for the last time and the first, as sure of his actions as he had ever been whilst a squire and yet as virginal as a maid. Renly smiles, his crooked tooth glinting in the slowly growing sunlight, and lays his cloak on the rocky ground to spare Loras’ back the chill of the stone. He sheds layer after layer of clothes from his squire, peeling away doublet and inhibitions alike until he and Loras are both naked as the dawn.

He lays his new knight down on the spread velvet, takes the oil - stolen from the sept - from the pocket of his doublet, and presses kisses down from Loras’ mouth, over the golden skin of his chest to lie between his legs. Here Loras’ skin is dusky, smelling less sweet than musky, and yet his mouth waters, his tongue flickering out to taste. Loras throws his head back, arches his back, lets out a soft noise into the air of the cave; Renly wraps his tongue around him, laps at him, draws him into his mouth until Loras’ noises are no longer soft but loud and urgent, his hands tangling in Renly’s hair, as he is taken apart piece by piece.

When Loras spends into his mouth, Renly makes a blissful noise, swallowing every drop. His fingers, slick with oil, press and rub at that other secret place, opening Loras’ body for him, and when he pulls them away to push inside, Loras cries out, his eyes flying open and gazing at Renly as though at the sun itself.

‘I love you,’ he whispers, ‘by the old gods and the new, I swear it, I love you, I love you.’

Renly kisses him, soft and sure, and rocks his hips, pressing himself deeper into Loras until he can go no further. He leans down, kisses at Loras’ chest, presses his lips over his lover’s thundering heartbeat until he can be sure he’s left a mark on Loras’ heart as indelible on the one on his own.

‘I love you,’ he murmurs, and means it, and Loras’ back arches again as he spills, his legs tight around Renly’s waist and heart full. Renly follows a few moments later as he drinks in the wonder on Loras’ face, the frantic tattoo of his heartbeat against Renly’s lips, and the slight, delicate pain of his fingernails biting into the muscled flesh of Renly’s shoulderblades. Renly holds him close, stroking his hand through Loras’ tangled curls, laying kiss after kiss to his lips. He wants to press even closer, to step inside Loras until they are one and the same, unable to ever be parted by gods or men.

‘Is this how it feels,’ he says, as the sun rises over the horizon and Loras’ eyelashes flutter sleepily on his cheekbones, his head nestled in the crook of Renly’s shoulder, ‘to be in love?’

‘How does it feel?’ Loras asks, voice thick and soft.

‘Like I’m not my own any more,’ Renly murmurs into his hair. ‘Like all I am is yours, every last piece.’

‘Yes,’ Loras answers, and smiles.

* * *

**\+ I**

The last time Loras visits the cave, he is carrying a heavy burden. Not just the weight of the king’s body, wrapped in a shroud of cloth-of-gold, his crown settled over his brow, laughing blue eyes closed as if in sleep. The night is dark, and Loras is saddle-sore and heartsick, having ridden to that clifftop in the Stormlands from the camp at Bitterbridge. Emmon and Robar’s blood still saturates the green silk of his tunic, soaking through onto his very skin it seems. He feels nothing of that sodden discomfort, barely even remembers it past the roaring in his ears and the tunnel of red around his vision. He washes his hands in a pool of rainwater that has collected in a shallow basin in the rock, can’t bear to smear more blood over Renly’s precious, still face. He carries him down the slim steps and onto the outcrop, into the cave; his hands gentle, like a father carrying a sleeping child to bed.

There is no earth to bury him, not inside the cave. So Loras edges back out, climbs down the stairs to the beach below, and selects stones for a cairn, heaving them back up until sweat pours down his back and over his brow and his muscles scream and ache. The pain is good, is a welcome distraction from the terrible raw throb of grief in his chest, the gaping empty hole Renly has left behind him. Had they not sworn to one another, a thousand thousand times, that they would never let themselves be parted? That they would love one another until the earth crumbled to dust around them and the skies split apart in fire and blood and the universe as they knew it ended? Were they not as the sun to one another, as necessary to one another’s existence as food and air and water? How could Renly have left him, have _allowed himself_ to leave him like this?

He places the stones around the king’s body, building a casket of rock and packing it firm with sandy silt from the beach. He wishes he could have brought flowers, to lay on the grave.

When he places the last stone, the one framing the king’s still face and lying over the ruin that has been made of his throat, he sits back on his haunches and allows the tears to fall. He cries and cries until his eyes are dry, until it feels like there’s not another drop of moisture in his entire body, before he leaves the cave by shuffling out backwards, unwilling to look away from Renly for even a moment.

He leaves the entrance open, unguarded by stone or door. Renly would hate to never feel the sun on his face again, nor see it rise and set, the stars come out or fade away. He climbs back up the steps in the cliff face and jumps up onto his horse, digging in his heels and riding back to Bitterbridge and his sister, once a queen, now a widow.

 _And if you have a minute, why don’t we go_  
_Talk about it somewhere only we know?_  
_This could be the end of everything_  
_So why don’t we go somewhere only we know?_

FIN

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry for a) the emotional pain, and b) the fact that the last two 'chapters' were so short. Throw tomatoes. Go ahead. I deserve it.
> 
> A visual for the Stormlands coastline/the cave's location is [here](http://www.kayak.co.uk/magazine/wp-content/uploads/sites/78/2017/05/less-known-places-UK-john-o-groats-800x500.jpg). Scotland is truly beautiful.


End file.
